July 31, 2016

On Sec. Albert Del Rosario, is there anybody worse than Karen Davila?

Karen Davila is a trashy reporter, but it turns out the rest are trashier. There’s something Philippine Media deliberately ignores, and it’s a cause for national concern.

NOTE: This is the original English version of the ThinkingPinoy article "On Sec. Albert Del Rosario, is there anybody worse than Karen Davila?". If you want to read the Tatalog Translation, PLEASE CLICK HERE.

Major Philippine media outlets, which ThinkingPinoy will collectively call Big Media, have been hailing the Aquino administration’s Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario as a patriot after he purportedly fought for our nation’s interest in the South China Sea dispute.

For some reason, big media appears to believe, and takes every effort to make the public believe, that “Albert del Rosario is a patriot” is some sort of Bible Truth, a notion that is difficult to reconcile with reality.

Karen Davila’s interview with del Rosario [TP: Dear Karen], despite being extremely problematic, appears to the ONLY attempt by Big Media to investigate the issue.

Is there a media blackout on Del Rosario's conflict of interest?

I, ThinkingPinoy, will discuss this problem by first asking (and eventually, answering) four basic questions:

Who is Albert del Rosario?

What did Albert del Rosario do?

What laws did Albert del Rosario violate?

What did Karen Davila and Big Media do?

Now, it’s time to answer the first question, which is…

Who is Albert del Rosario?

Since 2004 and with a five-year break from 2011 to 2015, Albert del Rosario served a company director of Indonesian-owned, Hong Kong-based conglomerate First Pacific, where Business tycoon Manny V. Pangilinan (MVP) is managing director and CEO [FP].

First Pacific was founded by Chinese-Indonesian Sudono Salim, a famous crony of the late dictator Suharto, and was once the richest man in Indonesia [JP]. Essentially, Salim is to First Pacific as Danding Cojuangco is to San Miguel Corporation [TP: Coco Levy].

First Pacific attempted to downplay del Rosario’s role using the job description “Non-executive Director” [FP], despite the fact that First Pacific actually used del Rosario’s name as its primary director in its Disclosure of Interests in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange [HKEx].

Hindi raw mahalaga pero siya ang frontline man ng First Pacific?

Based on his official profile [FP], Del Rosario became DFA secretary in February 2011 while still a First Pacific director, then resigned a month later, probably out of an attempt at exercising delicadeza.

But del Rosario’s delicadeza stopped right there.

That is, TP asks…

What did Albert del Rosario do?

In his five years in the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), del Rosario consistently used his government position to give favors to First Pacific’s Philippine subsidiaries, i.e. companies under the Salim-MVP group. Let’s list down some of the things he did:

FIRST: Just a week after becoming DFA chief [ABS], del Rosario authorized Salim-MVP company Forum Energy to find hydrocarbons in the South China Sea [Storey 2011], despite full knowledge that it squarely violates the 2002 ASEAN Declaration of Conduct (2002 DoC) which states:

5. The Parties undertake to exercise self-restraint in the conduct of activities that would complicate or escalate disputes and affect peace and stability… [ASEAN]

SECOND: China’s vessels aggressively approached Salim-MVP’s survey ship so the latter had to retreat. Instead of talking to China per 2002 DoC, del Rosario ignored Chinese opposition by authorizing the ship’s return, allowing it to complete the survey on that same month [ABS].

FIFTH: Philex Petroleum’s stocks debuted in September 2011, well into del Rosario’s foreign affairs stint [Inq]. In short, del Rosario acquired these assets right in the middle of the PH-China squabble.

SIXTH: Del Rosario still owns the petroleum stocks. As of 08 April 2015 disclosure [PSE], Del Rosario still belongs to Philex Petroleums Top 100 shareholders.

EIGHTH: Del Rosario usurped the Department of Energy’s authority over South China Sea petroleum contracts, despite the fact that Philex Petroleum is directly interested in it [Inq].

NINTH: Then in 2013, DFA then extended Forum Energy’s Recto Bank exploration license by two more years [Inq].

TENTH: The government awarded three petroleum contracts from 2011 to 2013 [DOE], two of them went to MVP companies (Philex and Pitkin) [FP]. While it initially appeared that Salim-MVP didn’t monopolize PH petroleum, the third contract was a dud, as awardee Otto Energy quit PH oil and gas last year, citing plans to develop other assets with “better potential” in other countries [MT].

These ten points clearly show del Rosario’s hand in furthering Salim-MVP’s business interests. Even if some smart-ass out there manages to rebut half of these points, the rest of the points still stand.

Del Rosario doesn't wanna sell us out to China. He wants to sell us out to Indonesia instead.

Kulang na lang ay i-rename ang DFA into "DMVP".

Moving on, it’s time to ask…

Exactly which laws did Albert del Rosario violate?

I will cite Article VII, Section 13 of the 1987 Constitution [Gov.ph]:

“Section 13. The… Members of the Cabinet… shall not… during said tenure, directly or indirectly… be financially interested in any contract with… the Government. They shall strictly avoid conflict of interest in the conduct of their office.”

Del Rosario clearly violated that provision in the constitution, but just like any other lawsuit, we have to cite an implementing law that del Rosario actually violated.

“… having a material interest in any transaction… requiring the approval of a… group of which he is a member, and which exercises discretion in such approval, even if he votes against the same or does not participate… Interest for personal gain shall be presumed against those public officers…”

Public officials and employees shall not, directly or indirectly, have any financial or material interest in any transaction requiring the approval of their office.

I leave it to the reader to match Del Rosario’s ten deeds listed in the previous section to one or more of the laws cited in this section. Note that there may be other laws or provisions that are relevant to this discussion, but I felt that these three are sufficient to elucidate my point.

Del Rosario is no patriot. He’s a criminal, a criminal who's making the Indonesian version of Danding Cojuangco richer, at the expense of the common tao.

So yes, the public needs to ask del Rosario’s side on this, and the perfect opportunity was when ABS-CBN journalist Karen Davila interviewed him in Headstart on 18 July 2016, or less than a week after the final ruling on the South China Sea arbitration case was released.

It doesn’t matter as much anymore at this time. What’s more important is the question on whether other major news outlets have considered exploring this Del Rosario conflict of interest issue.To do that, ThinkingPinoy did several site-specific google searches for the following term:

site: conflict of interest del rosario

Note that “site:” forces google to return results that are within that specific site. Thus, using “site:news.abs-cbn.com” limits the results to ABS-CBN articles. I used this search operator because I want to learn whether a specific news site has released an article related to Del Rosario’s conflicts of interest.

Now, it’s time to give you the results as of 11:27 PM Manila, 30 July 2016.

A: Television’s Big Four

ABS-CBN: There was one instance, which was Karen Davila’s crappy interview with del Rosario mentioned in the previous section [Google].

These eight articles collectively garnered over 1 million hits and tens of thousands of social media shares, so how in the world can every Big Media employee, supported by their hordes of writers and editors, fail to read even one of them?

Now, some smartass out there would probably say, “Don’t be too full of yourself, maybe your audience are of the less educated kind,” but that alibi will not fly either.

Why? Because a simple google search for July 2016 articles [as of 30 July 2016, 11:56 PM Manila] using …

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